My Affiliate Marketing History

I’ve been around affiliate marketing for quite a while but I have to admit I’ve recently lost my motivation. It still pays the bills etc but I don’t think I enjoy the work as much as I used to. It’s obvious from my blogging (2nd post of 2010!) that I’m not as engaged with things but I thought I would take a look back over the years to remind myself of the high points and find that original motivation

15th March 2001

Earned my first ever commission via DatingDirect on Tradedoubler.

It all started here when I was amazed to earn money this way. Previously I had been running a small web development business but I was always just selling time so if I went on holiday or couldn’t find work etc then I didn’t earn.

Back then I remember getting my advice from alt.www.affiliate, an old Tradedoubler Yahoo Group which I think was started by Andrew Girdwood and of course the very early versions of Affiliates4u when it was on ezboard and still well worth a look for a trip down memory lane. Like when we all got excited about the launch of Google Adsense

Over the next couple of years my business started to shift away from having clients and doing web development and more into full time affiliate marketing and I seem to have been there since.

June 2003

I organised “The Limo Club” where a bunch of affiliates got together and hired a limo to go round London and try to meet all the major networks in one day.

As well as being a great day out it was a series of useful meetings and also a chance to put some pressure on the spyware issues of the day.

The following day was an affiliate get2gether at the Kensington Roof Gardens. This event was a big step up from the previous pub based events but no one could have imagined the a4uexpo in the future.

My Sites

Over this time I had expanded with a few different sites but my most successful was FullSteamAhead which is now a shadow of it’s former glory. It was a general shopping directory, list everything, datafeed & more site. I can’t track it down now but the Alexa graph showed a steady ascent with loads of traffic followed by a cliff drop on the graph when Google kicked me out. I think it just ended up being too successful and the overuse of datafeeds meant I ranked for every random product that was going. Lesson learned and time to move on.

Around this time I seemed to be doing well for Euroffice, Dabs, Figleaves & ASOS but the fields I worked in changed so much over the years. For example I’ve had a good few years of doing well from gift experiences with buyagift and also a good spell of ranking number 1 for ‘ghd hair straighteners’ which was nice. These things come and go for example I don’t think there will be an old timer in the industry that doesn’t remember jumping on the Britannia DVD Club program when it launched on buy.at

When I look back I know I should have worked harder in one field to dominate and built a brand but instead I’ve always jumped about a bit getting tempted by the next new project to work on and moving into a different field.

For a spell I did well from adsense alongside the affiliate stuff as many people did but over time my sites and interests changed again. On my best Adsense day I sent 1,457 clicks earning a couple of hundred pounds at which point I probably put my feet up for a few months and paid the price again Yesterday I earned £2.10

Spyware

Around 2004, 2005 spyware was really at it’s peak and the affiliates of a4u did a great job of working together to get some regulation in place by the networks. I remember taking an old laptop, getting it infected and recording just what was going on. Slowly the networks adopted some rules against this and to date I don’t think it’s as much of a problem here as it is in the US.

2006 The Podcast Years

In June of 2006 I started recording podcasts with various people in the industry. To date I think I’ve recorded 34 podcasts but haven’t added to them in the last couple of years. It was a fun way to learn and share more about the industry but the time involved just became a bit too much and had to give way to real work that had a financial return. I enjoyed speaking to everyone involved but a few of the more popular ones in terms of comments were Doug Scott for some straight talking, Kieron Donoghue about how he got started & a group discussion on discount codes. Here’s one from 2007 that’s topical now.

Recent Years

I got married in 2004 and then in 2007 my daughter was born and my business week changed completely. Very much like John Lamerton’s recent post I’ve been kind of part time since then. I don’t really work outside of Monday-Friday 10-5 and spend a heap more time with my daughter including regular half days here and there. In the early days I would regularly have been working at 2 or 3am but it just doesn’t fit with life now! Leaving the world of affiliate marketing and entering the world of mother & toddler groups has been a good change and my wife and daughter always come first for me.

2008 saw me get along to my first a4uexpo and it was amazing to see the change in the industry. It’s great to see the growth and the recognition that the industry gets and to have things on a professional footing but I confess I do miss the atmosphere in years gone by. No one would ever dream of sharing this kind of information in a post like this these days. What’s changed? I’m not sure I guess it’s inevitable as things grow that it can’t have that small team feeling where we all know we’re doing something new.

Now I’m working on a number of hopefully good quality content sites and slowly trying to build brands around them. I’ve learned that I can’t have all my eggs in one basket and I can’t keep starting new things. I don’t have as many working hours so I need to be careful with how I spend them and accept I can’t do everything. I’ve accepted that I don’t need to earn millions but I’d rather enjoy life. Like Kirsty I want to be a Pretty Good Affiliate and don’t wish I was ‘Super’. Slow and steady is the way forward even if it is a little dull these days!

Sorry for the self indulgent trip down memory lane but if you’ve read this far you must have some memories to add in the comments about the last ten years or so

There has been quite a bit of coverage about Impact Radius in the last week but if you were like me earlier today then you might still be trying to work your way through the press release to actually figure out what’s in it for affiliates. Thankfully I’m just off the phone to Ricki Jones (ex Affilinet, CJ & Wheel) who will be heading up the UK office and so I’ve got a bit more idea of what’s going on now

The company grew out of the realisation that often a traditional affiliate network could best serve their clients by getting out the way and letting affiliates speak directly to merchants. Even when networks offer a full affiliate management service to their clients it’s hard for them to know either side of the business as well as the people working in it each day. So with that in mind Impact Radius is about offering a solution rather then a service.

3 Key Issues for Affiliates

1. Open Conact – Yellow Pages style directory with full contact information for both advertisers & affiliates (media partners in Impact Radius terms) This means it should be easy for both sides of the relationship to contact each other and to find relevant partners to work with.
2. Pricing Structure – Impact Radius override fees are much lower than most networks with the highest level being 10% and sliding down with volume. The transparency means that you know the full costs to the advertiser of your activity and so for example you could suggest a higher CPA based on sending a higher volume of leads that would bring the override down.
3. Negotiation – using the directory you would be able to find merchants and approach them with an offer of a commission rate that would be acceptable to you. This is managed by insertion orders back and forth which are all logged when the agreement is made. Up for discussion would be commission rate, cookie duration, minimum CPC’s, any performance caps, incentive tiers and any other specific terms and conditions required.

There are a host of other features that should also be interesting for example flexible payments (daily if required!) and also facilities to track offline activity through unique voucher code, pay-per-call and unique URL tracking.

Time will tell how it works out as aspects like the directory idea might be hard work to reach a tipping point before it becomes an “everyone who’s anyone” type directory. Overall though I think it’s a really interesting business and it will be intriguing to watch how it finds it place in the UK market.

Three and a half years after sending this visitor to Buyagift I’ve just made £7.76

The affiliate program is on Affiliate Window and I interviewed Graham Keen from Buyagift around the same time as I sent that first click

A quick note to thank Gone Digging for the wine I received recently. It’s great to see the personalised bottles for real and in the boxes it does make for a great gift.

The Gone Digging affiliate program is on Webgains and they are also running a competition at the moment to win yourself some personalised wine. You can follow Jim Kinloch on twitter for more info about how to win.

It’s also nice that I can write two articles about this gift including one over at my wine site about personalised wine gifts

Thanks also to Nadeem at Azam Marketing for sorting this out.

This morning I had a chat to Julia Nisted who is European Affiliate Manager for the eBay Partner Network and she outlined some very interesting changes to the commission structure of the affiliate program planned from 1st September 2009.

Currently eBay pay out a CPA on new users and a percentage of revenue from sellers fees but from 1st September they are going to switch to a new concept which they have called Quality Click Pricing. As the most simple level this is a switch to CPC payouts which may seem like a strange step at first but the CPC payment is going to be based on the quality of the traffic and vary for each publisher on a daily basis.

The quality algorithm is based on both the short term and long term value of the click to eBay with various elements deciding an EPC on a daily basis. For example sales completed closer to the click time would be valued higher as there is more direct evidence that the click contributed to the sale. In some ways this is an attempt to vary the ‘last click wins’ approach that is currently in place with most affiliate programs and to help content affiliates and others who produce quality sites. Since eBay can tell what a click from a specific affiliate is normally worth to them then it’s a creative way to pay appropriately.

Julia said that the motivation for this change was to see their good affiliates rewarded with higher payouts and their bad affiliates to earn less as an incentive to improve. eBay believe that some of their smaller affiliates are providing some of their best quality traffic and so this allows them to invest in growing that side of the network. During the beta test they also found that it encouraged some affiliates to work on improving their traffic either through developing their own sites or looking at their traffic sources.

More info is available on the eBay blog including the official press release.

From my point of view it seems a bold move and I hope it’s one that works out well. It’s nice to see a creative approach to solving a problem and they seem to have avoided the Adsense approach which leaves you without a clue about why some clicks earned so much more than others. I’d be really keen to hear in the comments any other opinions or from people active on the eBay Partner Network about how you think the change will affect you.

As a side note we also discussed that eBay doesn’t seem to be talked about much in the UK affiliate marketing community and I wasn’t totally sure of the reasons behind this. Are many of you active on the eBay network? Given that eBay.co.uk’s unique audience was over 17m in June this year it seems we are all buying and selling there but not talking about the affiliate program!

A bit of a turn around from my usual role in an interview as this time I’m answering the questions.

Leo Fogarty sent me over some questions via email which I did my best to answer for his blog. Head over there and have a read if that’s of interest.

Just a short post to comment on the smart new look over at Paid On Results. Shame to see the back of POR man but it’s a nice fresh new design.

Clarke Duncan, Director and Shareholder, spoke about the company’s new identity:-

“This is an exciting time for Paid On Results as we continue to grow steadily and recruit additional staff in the face of the global recession. The rebranding reflects this excitement and optimism. The future for Paid On Results sees further growth aided by an increased emphasis on sales and marketing. Today Paid On Results can look to the future with confidence, largely because of its strong background in bringing to the fore innovative technology and in employing knowledgeable, friendly staff. We will continue to build our independent business based on these strong foundations. “